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Nickolas Komninos When Meaning Moves Across Modes: A Corpus-Informed
University of Udine, Italy
nickolas.komninos@uniud.it
© 2026 Nickolas Komninos
Meaning-Making, Multiliteracies
and Multimodality
Abstracts of the International
Symposium
Koper, 19–20 March 2026
Multimodal Study of Obituaries and Implications
for Mother-Tongue Literacy
This presentation uses a corpus-informed multimodal approach to examine
meaning-making in obituaries, and considers implications for mother-tongue
literacy. Contemporary meaning-making increasingly unfolds across platforms
where language interacts with image, sound, layout, and algorithmic curation.
This shift challenges traditional ‘mother tongue’ literacy frameworks that priv-
ilege print and treat other semiotic resources as secondary. Building on multi-
literacies (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996), this paper uses obituary discourse as a
focused case study to show how a stable genre adapts to new media environ-
ments – and what this implies for literacy education.
The study analyses a purpose-built corpus of footballer obituaries across five me-
dia contexts: broadsheet newspapers, tabloid newspapers, institutional websites,
radio, and short-form video. Using a function-first move-analytic framework com-
binedwithcorpusmethods(phrase-framesandsyntacticcomplexity)(Biberetal.,
1998; Butcher & Helmond, 2018), the presentation maps how core obituary pur-
poses – announcing death, legitimising the deceased, narrating a life trajectory,
and establishing legacy – remain recognisable across platforms while being re-
alised through different semiotic configurations. Findings indicate that print and
institutional texts carry genre work primarily through rhetorical sequencing and
clause-level linguistic choices, whereas audio and especially video redistribute
key functions across spoken testimony, archival footage, music, on-screen text,
and montage.Inotherwords,meaning is not merely‘added’multimodally;it is re-
organised, with semiotic resources taking over communicative labour tradition-
ally performed by prose.
The presentation then reframes these results as multiliteracy demands rele-
vant to mother tongue classrooms: learners need competencies for identifying
genre purposes across modes, tracing how credibility and stance are constructed
through multimodal evidence, and interpreting how platform constraints and al-
gorithms shape what becomes ‘sayable’ and ‘visible’ (Bender et al., 2021). The
discussion closes by positioning AI-generated commemorative texts as a further
step in this trajectory: when machines can reproduce genre moves and phraseol-
ogy, multiliteracy must include critical awareness of automation, authorship, and
responsibility in public meaning-making.
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers
of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In FAccT ’21: Proceed-
ings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
(pp. 610–623). Association for Computing Machinery.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Reppen, R. (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language
structure and use. Cambridge University Press.
Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2018). The affordances of social media platforms. In J.
Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social media (pp.
233–253). Sage.
Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design.
Routledge.
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